Results tagged “bag”

The NYCLU filed a lawsuit yesterday on behalf of a Brooklyn man who says the NYPD has stopped him in the subway and searched his bag an excessive number of times because he looks Middle Eastern. 32-year-old Jangir Sultan was born in Brooklyn, where he currently resides, but he accuses NYPD officers of racial profiling, stopping him 21 times over three years. Police began searching subway riders' bags at checkpoints in 2005 in the wake of the London subway bombings, but the department insists the checks are race-neutral and conducted randomly.

An Army soldier was arrested at MacArthur airport on Long Island Saturday morning after she tried to bring a loaded revolver on a flight to San Antonio, Texas. The piece was not Army issue and 38-year-old Spc. Vonda Collier, who has been stationed for the past year at Camp Liberty near Baghdad, did not have a New York license to carry it. She was arrested and charged with criminal possession of a weapon after it was found during a routine baggage check. Collier is on bereavement leave to attend her mother's funeral in Texas; police say she was visiting relatives on Long Island but her father tells Newsday she has no family here. And last Thursday a man was arrested at MacArthur for trying to bring a pipe bomb on the plane home to Vegas. He says he just wanted to "cause a giant smoke cloud, a flash of light and hopefully a loud noise."

Security guards have stopped searching bags belonging to people attending a biweekly movie night in Tompkins Square Park after a group of 15 activists protested Wednesday night. The Villager was at the scene, where critics of the bag checks had vowed to strip naked to ironically facilitate the security searches. Mercifully, it didn’t come to that. Josh Boyd, a co-founder of the free movie series, called off the search “because it was upsetting people.” Jeffrey Rothman, a civil rights lawyer who attended as a legal observer, sounded a triumphant note as audience members filed freely into a screening of Better Off Dead: “Rights that are not asserted wither away.” [Photo: Villager/Jefferson Siegel]

DOS police lieutenant John Fitzgerald is a 24-year vet who's better known as the guy who ended up carrying Naomi Campbell's bag when she reported for day two of her community service last year. And now he's stepping out of the model's shadow.